Feds Shut Down Silk Road Black Market, Owner Known As 'Dread Pirate Roberts' Arrested

Silk Road, shut down by the feds even during a fed shut down. (Credit: Krebs on Security)
Even during a federal government shutdown, drug pirates aren’t safe. Popular online black market Silk Road has been shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and an individual alleged to be its infamous owner, ‘Dread Pirate Roberts,’ has been arrested, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation complaint.
Ross William Ulbricht, allegedly the ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ owner of Silk Road, was arrested in San Francisco on Tues. at 3:15pm PT at a public library and his popular site shut down.
Krebs on Security uploaded a photo of Silk Road apparently shut down by an FBI raid and has since published the full government complaint. It alleges that Ross William Ulbricht, a San Francisco resident, is the mastermind behind the Silk Road, and the ‘DPR’ behind its booming marketplace of activity for narcotics and other illicit goods, the most famous use of the open-source electronic money known as Bitcoin.
The FBI calls Silk Road in the complaint “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today,” used by several thousand drug dealers and with revenue of over 9.5 million Bitcoins to date, which the FBI approximates as worth $1.2 billion in sales. (Bitcoin values fluctuate widely over time, making any comparison difficult.)
Ulbricht has been charged with one count of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. The full complaint linked to above is worth a read, but it appears that agents found Ulbricht after Canadian border authorities routinely checked a package intended for his San Francisco home and discovered nine fake identification cards within, which Ulbricht allegedly was seeking to obtain to rent more servers to power Silk Road as it massively expanded.
The man behind Silk Road’s commission on the activity, the FBI alleges, has totaled 600,000 Bitcoins, or about $80 million by its own conversions.
For the best account to date of the Dread Pirate Robert’s life, formerly behind the scenes, check FORBES’  cover story, “The Man Behind Booming Black Market Drug Website Silk Road.” In the story, DPR, or Ulbricht as the FBI now claims, told Andy Greenberg he couldn’t communicate outside of the underground anonymous Tor software system through which he operated Silk Road, noting: “The highest levels of government are hunting me, I can’t take any chances.”
In a separate interview, DPR told Greenberg that he hadn’t started Silk Road but had taken over for Silk Road’s true founder, who was “well compensated” for the switch and remained active. The name ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ is a reference to  the movie ‘The Princess Bride,’ in which the character by that name mentions having his own predecessors.
If DPR’s claim to Greenberg is true that he was not the first administrator on the site, it’s possible that the government’s manhunt is not over. The FBI complaint also notes DPR had several associate administrators working with him to operate the site.
The Silk Road didn’t just sell drugs. The FBI says listings also offered social media hacks, illegal contact lists, currency and firearms.
It appears that looking to purchase identification may have been that unnecessary chance that has put an end to the current DPR’s run, but there were other holes in the system. FORBES also purchased marijuana over the Silk Road market and found its purchases could be traced.

Forbes